In November 1883, the Protestant pastor in Affaltrach, a small confessionally mixed community in Württemberg, decided to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s birth by planting a linden tree in the village. The idea was in itself uncontroversial—in that year ‘Luther-lindens’ were planted all over Germany. The question of location was less straightforward. The pastor and members of his congregation opted to plant the tree on the courtyard beside the little church shared by the village’s Catholic and Protestant congregations. The courtyard lay directly in front of the village’s Catholic rectory. The Catholic priest, Father Geiger, made a formal protest to the district authorities, but the planting went ahead all the same. To add insult to injury his Protestant colleague, excited no doubt by the Lutheran celebrations unfolding across Germany, used the occasion to deliver an intemperate speech full of polemical denunciations of the Catholic Church.
Hardly had the young tree begun to spread its roots when it was attacked under the cover of darkness by a person or persons unknown. The trunk was sawn through so that only a stump was left. And thus it remained until June, when the feast of Corpus Christi was drawing near. In the warmer weather, new green shoots appeared around the rim of the stump, and one morning the priest woke to find that a sturdy wooden fence—built by an unknown (presumably Protestant) villager during the hours of darkness—had sprung up around the mutilated tree. The Catholic village council responded with a formal complaint demanding that the district authorities remove the fence and pull out the offending stump. The mood between the two congregations deteriorated and the Corpus Christi celebrations of that year were marked by tension and conflict between Protestant and Catholic villagers. In his annual parish report for 1884, the Protestant pastor looked back with a certain pride on these parochial quarrels: ‘The Luther anniversary of last year awoke us to a keener awareness of the treasure of our Protestant faith, but it also sharpened our opposition to the Roman church. This is an undeniable improvement.’1
The conflict over the linden tree in sleepy Affaltrach is hardly the stuff of historical epic, but it encapsulates one of the most distinctive features of society in Imperial Germany. ‘In no other era of German history have religious questions been approached with greater zeal than at this moment,’ the Social Democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht told an audience of Dresden workers in February 1872. ‘One feels that one has been transported back into the wildest years after the Reformation, so widespread is the quarrelling over religion.’2 Liebknecht, a socialist and atheist with little sympathy for the religious stirrings of his time, was exaggerating, but he had a point. After the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, religion, always an important social force in German public life, acquired a new and heightened significance. Confessional conflicts became interwoven with other social, political, and economic forces at work in the new nation state. They polarized politics, cultural and associational networks, neighbourhood relations and national solidarities, kinship groups and business dealings. Religion became one of the structuring facts of German public life. There has always been intermittent tension between church and state in German-speaking Europe—as almost everywhere else on the Continent. What distinguished the culture wars of the late nineteenth century was their scope. They were a socially deep phenomenon, whose effects were felt not only in parliamentary committees but also in small towns and villages. They involved not only political parties, ministerial factions, and senior clergymen, but also journalists, vicars, parish priests, and the masses of the faithful. The culture wars transcended the divide between politics and everyday life.
It is only relatively recently that the history of religion has begun to attract serious interest from historians of the German Empire. Until the 1980s, it was something studied by people called ‘church historians’ who attended their own conferences, published their own journals, and inhabited their own faculties and institutions. Their ‘profane’ (profanhistorisch) mainstream colleagues in the history faculties took little interest in their doings. The most influential historical treatments of the imperial era proceeded from the assumption that religion was on the wane in a swiftly modernizing society. The traditional collective affiliations of confession were supposedly making way for the new secular identities of class and nation. Such religious commitments as persisted were survivals from an earlier era; religious conflicts were thus little more than rearguard actions that could neither halt nor deflect the onward march of history into a secular modernity.
Times have changed, and so has the writing of history. Beginning in the early 1980s, the ‘cultural turn’ in historical studies focused attention on those forms of collective subjectivity that mediate behaviour and bestow meaning on human experience. In West Germany, historians of democratic politics became increasingly interested in the role played by religion in stabilizing the constituencies of the major political parties. In the process, religion became one of the most vibrant growth areas in the historiography of Imperial Germany. Innovative studies illuminated the role played by religion in associational networks, voting behaviour, political mobilization, and the emergence of distinct socio-moral milieux.3
The dramatic expansion of interest in what was once a marginal and neglected subject matter has transformed our understanding of the history of modern Germany. However, it has also given rise to new and difficult questions. How deep was the divide between the confessional camps in the German Empire? Was religion a modernizing force? Did the mobilization of confessional commitments help or hinder processes of emancipation—of religious minorities, for example, or of women? Should the prominence of confessional questions and confessional conflicts in German society be seen as one strand in a unique German path to modernity (the Sonderweg)? Is ‘secularization’—once a presiding rubric of historiography on the late nineteenth century—still a useful framing concept for the era? And if secularization did indeed take place, how can we reconcile that fact with the phenomena of religious revival and confessional conflict?
Hardly had the German Empire been proclaimed, but a bitter conflict broke out between the Prussian government and the Catholic Church. By the end of 1878, more than 1,800 German Catholic priests had been incarcerated or exiled and over 16 million Marks worth of ecclesiastical property seized. In the first four months of 1875 alone, 241 priests, 136 Catholic newspaper editors, and 210 Catholic laymen were fined or imprisoned, 20 newspapers were confiscated, 74 Catholic houses were searched, 103 Catholic political activists were expelled or interned, and 55 Catholic associations or clubs were closed down. As late as 1881, one-quarter of all Prussian parishes remained without priests. This was Germany at the height of the Kulturkampf, a ‘struggle of cultures’ that would shape German politics and public life for generations.
Germany was not the only European state to see tension over confessional questions in this era. In the 1870s and 1880s, there was heightened conflict between Catholics and secular or anticlerical liberal movements across the European Continent. But the German case stands out. Nowhere else did the state proceed so systematically against Catholic institutions and personnel. Administrative reform and the law were the two main instruments of discrimination. In 1871, the Criminal Code was amended to enable the authorities to prosecute priests who used the pulpit ‘for political ends’. In 1872, further state measures eliminated the influence of clergymen over the planning and implementation of school curricula and the supervision of schools. Members of religious orders were prohibited from teaching in the state school system and the Jesuits were expelled from the German Empire. Under the ‘May Laws’ of 1873, the training and appointment of clergy in Prussia were placed under state supervision. In 1874, the Prussian government introduced compulsory civil marriage, a step extended to the entire German Empire a year later. Additional legislation in 1875 abolished various allegedly suspect religious orders and choked off state subsidies to the church. As Catholic religious personnel were expelled, jailed, and forced into hiding, state-authorized ‘agents’ were sent in to take charge of vacated bishoprics.
Otto von Bismarck was the driving force behind this unprecedented campaign. Why did he undertake it? The answer lies partly in his emphatically Protestant and partisan understanding of the German national question. In the 1850s, during his posting in Frankfurt am Main as Prussia’s representative to the German Confederation, Bismarck had come to believe that political Catholicism was the chief ‘enemy of Prussia’ in southern Germany. The spectacle of Catholic revivalist piety, with its demonstrative pilgrimages and public festivities, filled him with disgust, as did the increasingly Roman orientation of mid-century Catholicism.4 At times, indeed, he doubted whether this ‘hypocritical idolatrous papism, full of hate and cunning’, was a religion at all, because its ‘presumptuous dogma falsified God’s revelation and nurtured idolatry as a basis for worldly domination’.5 A number of larger themes were bundled together in Bismarck’s appraisal: a fastidious Protestant contempt (accentuated by his Pietist spirituality) for the outward display so characteristic of the Catholic revival, a strain of half-submerged German idealism, and political apprehensions (shading into paranoia) about the Church’s capacity to manipulate minds and mobilize the masses.
These antipathies were deepened by the conflicts that brought about the unification of Germany. German Catholics had traditionally looked to Austria for leadership in German affairs and they were unenthusiastic about the prospect of a Prussian-dominated ‘lesser Germany’ (Kleindeutschland) excluding the six million (mainly Catholic) Austrian Germans. Conversely, after 1871, doubts about the political reliability of the Catholics were reinforced by the fact that, of the three main ethnic minorities (Poles, Alsatians, and Danes) whose representatives formed opposition parties in the Reichstag, two were emphatically Catholic. Bismarck was utterly persuaded of the political ‘disloyalty’ of the 2.5 million Catholic Poles in the Prussian east, and he suspected that the Church and its networks were deeply implicated in the Polish nationalist movement. ‘From the Russian border to the Adriatic Sea’, he told a Prussian cabinet meeting in the autumn of 1871, ‘we are confronted with the combined propaganda of Slavs, ultramontanes [papalist Catholics] and reactionaries, and it is necessary openly to defend our national interests and our language against such hostile activities.’6
These concerns resonated more destructively within the new nation state than they had before. The Bismarckian empire was not in any sense an ‘organic’ or historically evolved entity: it was the highly artificial product of four years of diplomacy and war. There was an unsettling sense that what had so swiftly been put together could also be undone—that the empire might never acquire the political or cultural cohesion to safeguard itself against fragmentation from within. These anxieties may seem absurd to us, but they felt real to many contemporaries. In this climate of uncertainty, it seemed plausible to view the Catholics as the most formidable domestic hindrance to a process of national consolidation that had still to be accomplished after the formal unification of 1871.
In lashing out against the Catholics, Bismarck knew that he could count on the enthusiastic support of the National Liberals and left liberals, whose powerful position in the new Reichstag and the Prussian House of Deputies made them indispensable political allies. In Germany, as in much of Europe, anti-Catholicism was one of the defining strands of late-nineteenth-century liberalism. Liberals deplored Catholicism as the absolute negation of their own world-view. They denounced the ‘despotism’ and ‘slavery’ of the doctrine of papal infallibility adopted by the Vatican Council in 1870, according to which the authority of the pope is unchallengeable when he speaks officially—ex cathedra—on matters of faith or morals. Liberal journalists depicted the Catholic faithful as a servile and manipulated herd. They drew a sharp contrast between the allegedly slavish and feminized character of the Catholic subculture and their own social universe centred on autonomous, manly tax-paying worthies with unbound consciences. A bestiary of anticlerical stereotypes emerged: the satires in liberal journals thronged with wily, thin Jesuits and lecherous, fat priests—amenable subjects because the cartoonist’s pen could make such artful play with the solid black of their garb. By vilifying the parish priest in his role as father confessor or by impugning the sexual propriety of nuns, liberals underscored their faith in the sanctity of the patriarchal nuclear family. For liberals, the Kulturkampf was nothing less than a ‘struggle of cultures’: the term was coined by the liberal Protestant pathologist Rudolf Virchow in a speech of February 1872 to the Prussian Landtag.7
Bismarck’s campaign against the Catholics was a failure. He had hoped that an anti-Catholic crusade would create a broad, Protestant liberal–conservative lobby that would help him to pass legislation consolidating the new empire. But the integrating effect of the campaign was more fleeting and fragile than he had anticipated. By the mid-1870s, left-wing liberals had begun to oppose the campaign on the grounds that it infringed fundamental rights. The increasing radicalism of anti-Church measures also prompted misgivings among many Protestants on the ‘clerical’ wing of German conservatism. The view gained ground that the real victim of the Kulturkampf was not the Catholic Church or Catholic politics as such, but religion itself.
Even if the support for Bismarck’s policy had been more secure, it is highly doubtful that he could ever have succeeded in neutralizing Catholic dissent by any of the means available to a constitutional and law-abiding state. Bismarck and his partisans made the familiar mistake of overrating the power of the state and under-estimating the determination of their opponents. In many areas, Catholic clergy simply failed to acknowledge or abide by the new laws. The authorities, who had rushed these measures through parliament and had not thought very deeply about how to ensure compliance, responded with improvised sanctions ranging from fines of varying severity to terms of imprisonment and exile.8 But these measures had little practical effect. The Church continued to ignore the new laws and the fines levied by government authorities continued to accumulate. When fines remained unpaid, the local authorities confiscated the property of bishops and offered it up at public auction. But this, too, was counterproductive, because loyal Catholics would rally to manage the auction in such a way as to ensure that the goods were sold at the lowest possible prices and returned to the expropriated clergyman. Imprisonment was equally futile. After even brief jail terms, priests returned as heroes to their parishes. The government attempted to resolve this problem in May 1874 by introducing a new set of regulations known collectively as the Expulsion Law. This law provided for the exile of insurgent bishops and clergy to remote locations—a favourite was the Baltic island of Rügen. Several hundred priests were thus exiled between 1875 and 1879. But this measure created more problems than it solved. It proved impossible to police the expulsion orders and difficult to replace the displaced priests with politically reliable successors. The state’s scheme to introduce its own nominees (‘state agents’) to replace exiled clergymen was an abject failure: these men were despised and avoided by the Catholic populace.
Perhaps the most conspicuous evidence of Bismarck’s failure was simply the spectacular growth of the German Centre Party, the party of Catholics. Although Bismarck did succeed in isolating the Centre Party politically, at least for a time, he could do nothing to prevent it from increasing its share of the popular vote in national elections. Whereas only 23 per cent of Prussian Catholics had voted for the Centre in 1871, 45 per cent did so in 1874. Thanks in large part to the challenge of responding to the intimidation of their church by Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, the Centre Party ‘peaked early’, efficiently colonizing its social milieu, mobilizing Catholics who had hitherto been politically inactive, expanding the frontiers of partisan politics. The most intense phase of the church–state struggle came to an end in 1878, when the accession of Pope Leo XIII opened the way to an improvement in relations. But the antagonisms stirred by the conflict were slow to disperse. This was in part because the legislative machinery of the Kulturkampf was only very gradually dismantled. In 1890, when Bismarck was forced to resign as chancellor, Catholics were still seeking the repeal of the Expatriation Law, the removal of restrictions on missionary activity, the scaling down of state controls on clerical appointments, and the readmission of the Jesuits to Germany. This long half-life of the anti-Catholic laws ensured that there was always sufficient combustible material available for politicians and journalists who were inclined to protest—or support—specific discriminatory measures.
By the late 1880s, in any case, the German culture war had acquired an impressive momentum, quite independent of initiatives from the political authorities. The associational landscape of the empire was dominated by two mass organizations representing confessional interests. The Protestant League was founded in 1886 to ‘defend the spiritual property’ of Protestantism and to ‘break the power of Rome on German soil’.9 It had acquired 100,000 members by 1895 and over half a million by 1914. The Protestant League specialized in the coordination of anti-Catholic rallies and demonstrations. The tone was set by speeches peppered with ‘gross denunciations and insults’. The league’s Catholic counterpart, the People’s Association for Catholic Germany, was founded in 1890 to provide adult education and cultural programmes. It counted over 800,000 members on the eve of the First World War. The tendency to form confessionally separate networks could also be observed in other mass organizations, including the ultra-nationalist Pan-German League (founded in 1891) and the Imperial League Against Social Democracy (1904). Such foundings contributed to intermittent phases of rhetorical escalation, in which champions of each camp broadcast their core values and defined each other in terms of the negation of those values. Protestant agitators thus denounced Catholics as culturally retrograde adherents of the pope and nationally unreliable (‘Romelings without a fatherland’); Catholic publicists warned against the godless pagans who sought to expunge every trace of true Christianity from German society. Rhetorically skilled ‘spiritual snipers’10 in both camps used well-aimed shots to raise the emotional temperature of confessional relations throughout Germany.
A distinctive feature of German confessionalism was the fact that it extended beyond the domain of religious institutions and practices to the realm of everyday life. Recent research on German associational networks has shown how successfully the clergy and their lay auxiliaries confessionalized the contexts in which even non-religious activities—sport, reading, labour representation, and consumption, for example—were conducted. The concentration of social and cultural life within separate confessional frameworks fostered the consolidation of distinct ‘milieux’ characterized by relatively high levels of exclusivity and group cohesion. Even within the more intimate world of the village or the small rural town, confessional antagonisms remained virulent, as the fate of the Luther-linden in Affaltrach suggests. In many confessionally mixed towns, the two camps each had their own bakers, butchers, and doctors. Where both congregations shared the local church, there were intermittent conflicts over the frequency and timing of services and the maintenance and decoration of the church interior. Cemeteries offered up another bone of contention: in 1904 the Bishop of Metz issued an interdict against the cemetery in a nearby village because the body of a Protestant had been buried in it. He was forced to withdraw the interdict after a nationwide wave of protests. As these examples make clear, it was not only the Catholics who felt victimized. Although Catholics accounted for 36 per cent of the empire’s population in 1900, in many areas of mixed confession it was the Protestants who felt threatened.
German political life, too, was divided along confessional lines. In national elections, the Centre Party routinely secured the ballots of around half of all Catholics eligible to vote. It also achieved remarkably high rates of voter loyalty: Centre Party voters were less likely than the supporters of any other major party to ‘defect’ to another party in a subsequent election. By contrast, the base of support for the liberal and conservative parties was predominantly Protestant, especially after the ‘Kulturkampf elections’ of 1874. For all its claims to represent the German nation as a whole, the National Liberal Party was an overwhelmingly Protestant institution, especially after the confessional struggle of the 1870s. Of the 620 Christian Reichstag deputies fielded by the party between 1867 and 1917, only 51 were Catholic, and of these, the majority were men who had already established themselves within the party before 1870. In 1874, the Conservative Party’s caucus in the Prussian House of Deputies did not include a single Catholic.
These tensions were also felt at the apex of the political system. Throughout the 1890s, the Centre Party continued to be seen by some of Germany’s most senior political decision makers as a Trojan horse, with which ultramontane Catholicism intended to smuggle particularism into national cultural matters and infiltrate German foreign policy with narrowly ‘Roman’ viewpoints. There was particular concern that the Centre Party would undermine the strategically important alliance with Italy through its open partisanship for the Vatican, which was at this time locked in struggle with the Italian state. Friedrich von Holstein, a powerful counsellor in the Foreign Office and an influential advisor to Kaiser Wilhelm II, repeatedly warned that concessions to the Centre Party would cause the empire to disintegrate under the pressure of internal confessional tensions. The Kaiser’s intimate friend and advisor Philipp zu Eulenburg was also given to fantasizing about ultramontane plots to relaunch the Counter-Reformation. The Kaiser himself was not immune to these partisan temptations: in a speech of May 1897 he triggered a minor political crisis by referring to the leaders of the Centre Party as ‘fellows without a fatherland’ (vaterlandslose Gesellen).11
At times, then, it seemed that the confessional struggle had split Germany into two distinct life-worlds (Lebenswelten). If the cleavage between the two confessions appeared so deeply entrenched, this was because it was not just a matter of religious difference. Underpinning it was the social geography of the German states. Catholics and Protestants were concentrated in specific regions of the empire (the Protestants, broadly speaking, in the north, north-east, and central regions, the Catholics on the Polish eastern periphery, the west, and the south-east). In the very extensive areas of mixed confession, such as the Rhineland, Bavarian Franconia, Württemberg, and Alsace, the two confessions had quite distinct occupational and cultural profiles. Catholics were on average poorer than Protestants; they were less likely to complete secondary school; and they were far less likely to attend university or to work in one of the ‘liberal’ professions. Even in rural areas of mixed confession, Catholics tended to farm smaller and less fertile plots of land. These structural differences lent an appearance of permanence and intractability to the confessional divide. They meant that confessional difference correlated—in many areas—with differences in mentality, attitude, wealth, and opportunity.
Nevertheless, when we speak of a Germany sundered into opposed ‘milieux’ or when we posit a return to the all-embracing ‘confessionalization’ of the post-Reformation era, there is a danger of pushing the argument too far. The conflict between Protestant/anti-clerical and Catholic/ultramontane forces was marked, as we have seen, by violent rhetorical exchanges. So all-pervasive was this process of discursive inflation that it came to constitute a kind of virtual reality. But the harsh binary oppositions of culture-war rhetoric belied a more complex reality of compromise, interdependence, and convergence. Even at the height of Bismarck’s assault on political Catholicism, the Prussian-German state maintained a working relationship with parts of the Catholic hierarchy. It was thanks to these contacts that Bismarck was able to inaugurate negotiations with the Vatican to put an end to the Kulturkampf in the late 1870s. During the following decade, Centre Party leaders and many politically active Catholics entered into a more positive relationship with the imperial state and embraced its great causes. Colonial policy was one important area of fruitful collaboration: the Centre Party supported colonialism as a means of hastening the Christianization and cultivation of the ‘pagan’ peoples of Africa. Here was a domain where Catholics could reconcile their commitment to universal Christian imperatives with support for a specifically national project. By the 1890s, conversely, the government had recognized that it would have to come to some kind of arrangement with the powerful Centre Party. It was not, of course, easy for the government to reconcile the need for Centre Party support with the sensitivity of the Protestant public to the slightest suggestion of a concession to Catholic interests. But it is clear nonetheless that the Centre Party gradually entered into a relationship of conditional collaboration with the administration. By 1907, indeed, following a flare-up of confessional tensions over colonial policy, the pressure for an accommodation with Germany’s national and imperial goals was sufficient to open a rift within the Centre Party. Nationally minded Catholics within the party formed the German Union, whose purpose was to support patriotic projects and overcome the confessional divide that ‘threaten[ed] to poison the life of our nation’.12 In March 1906 the Catholic publisher Julius Bachem issued a controversial call to open the doors of the party to non-Catholics. Referring to the metaphorical bastion of Catholic self-defence, Bachem declared: ‘We must leave the tower!’
There were other signs that the intensity of confessional antagonism was on the wane. Two recent studies of Catholic reading habits have shown that there was a tendency at the grass roots of popular Catholicism to move away from the insular culture of the 1870s towards a less church-centred and more nationally oriented spectrum of texts. Clergymen on both sides of the divide frequently lamented the growth of interconfessional fraternization, especially among younger people. There was also a steady, if inconspicuous, rise in the incidence of interconfessional marriages, despite the dire warnings of pastors and priests. In Prussia, the rate of mixed marriage doubled over the period 1840–1900, rising from 3.7 to 8.4 per cent; the percentage for the empire as a whole had reached 10.2 per cent by 1914. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such marriages were most common in the relatively secularized environment of the industrial cities: in 1896 mixed marriages accounted for 34 per cent of all unions in Frankfurt am Main and 36.5 per cent in Wiesbaden. But even in areas where confessional tensions had traditionally been quite pronounced, such as rural Alsace, there was a gradual rise, from 8.4 per cent in 1882 to 12.0 per cent in 1912. And there were conspicuous individual episodes of interconfessional rapprochement. In Weitbruch, Alsace, local authorities representing both confessions attended first one church and then the other to celebrate the Kaiser’s birthday. In 1904, in a celebrated gesture of ecumenical outreach, the Catholic priest in Weiterswiller invited the local Protestant pastor to join him in a confessionally mixed household at the bedside of a dying Catholic.
Where did all this leave the Jews of the German states, who accounted for about 1 per cent of the population? After 1869, Jews were no longer subject to discriminatory legislation of any kind. The North German Confederation’s Law of Religious Freedom (3 July 1869), which was subsequently incorporated into Reich law, explicitly abolished the link between citizenship rights and religious creed. The Jews were thus no longer a legally separate caste. But were they a ‘confessional minority’ comparable with other religious groups? Advocates of both legal emancipation and the social assimilation of Jews aimed to transform them from an ethnic entity into a German confessional group. The most important platform for the defence of Jewish civil rights after 1871 was the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, founded in 1893. In the face of those who claimed to speak for a homogeneous German Volk, the activists of the Central Association insisted that citizenship was a purely legal category, defined and guaranteed by the principles enshrined in the constitution. Thus the association’s members were not, according to their founding resolutions, ‘German Jews’ but ‘Germans of Jewish faith’. According to the association’s founding statutes, they had ‘no more in common with the Jews of other countries than the Catholics and Protestants of Germany [had] with the Catholics and Protestants of other countries’.13
There were certainly parallels between the Jewish and Catholic experience. The term ‘emancipation’, widely used with reference to the Jews, had initially entered the German language in the context of the struggle of Catholics for legal equality in Britain. There were analogies, too, in Protestant perceptions of the two minorities. Protestant polemical attacks against Catholic observance focused on the allegation that it was purely formal, legal, and ritualistic, and that it lacked the true subjectivity associated with ‘positive religion’; these themes also featured prominently in Protestant idealist critiques of Judaism. And like the Jews, the Catholics were accused of forming more than just a confession; to many Protestants they constituted something alien within the German body politic. The term ‘state within a state’ was used by Protestants to target Catholics (and Jesuits in particular) long before it passed into the lexicon of the antisemites. Finally, German Jews and German Catholics both suffered state discrimination after 1871, despite the absence of a legal sanction for such a policy. Both groups had difficulty gaining access to certain prestigious sections of the bureaucracy and to the upper ranks of the military.
German Jews were divided on how to define and safeguard their entitlements in the post-emancipation era. For politically progressive, assimilationist Jews, the key objective was to hold the state authorities to the letter of the law and protect individual Jews from discrimination on the grounds of their Jewishness. On this premise, the Central Association campaigned energetically for an end to unofficial discrimination against Jewish candidates for public service posts. Other Jewish groups, especially those of orthodox religious orientation, were more concerned with securing official recognition of the corporate claims of Judaism as a faith community. They pressed, for example, for exemptions from local regulations forbidding Sunday labour. They also sought the right to withdraw children from school during Jewish holidays. But while some Jews saw the quest for legal exemptions as a means to secure recognition for Judaism as a collective practice, others argued that such ‘special treatment’ would merely undermine the civil equality of the Jews and inhibit their quest for ‘invisibility’ as German citizens. This was an issue that drew a dividing line between the most and least assimilationist elements within the minority. During a debate on restrictions to Sunday labour in the city of Frankfurt, the Jewish councillor Berthold Geiger defended his opposition to exemptions for the Jews on the grounds that these amounted to a ‘yellow badge in modern form’.14
In several important respects, of course, the Jews were quite unlike either of the two mainstream Christian groups. The ‘Jewish Question’, which produced a flood of pamphlets, books, newspaper articles, and political speeches from the 1870s onwards, had no direct parallel in the historical experience of the other minorities. No other minority faced a concerted campaign of vilification to compare with the assault mounted by the political antisemites against the German Jews. The presumption among antisemites and their fellow travellers—that ‘Jewishness’ retained an indissoluble core of ethnic otherness—and their paranoid preoccupation with the role of Jews within the economy were features that set the Jewish predicament apart. The smallness of the Jewish minority was another defining factor: unlike the Catholics, the Jews would never be able to muster the numbers to bring direct pressure to bear on the government; there could no Jewish Centre Party. Nor could there be a Jewish ‘milieu’ in the normally accepted sense: assimilated Jews tended instead to opt for a pragmatic accommodation with the culture of the (mainly Protestant) urban middle classes, while at the same time preserving elements of a German-Jewish subculture.15 This was a strategy for which one historian has coined the term ‘situative ethnicity’.16
How should we characterize the relationship between German antisemitism and the cultural landscape of the Christian confessions? Discussion of this relationship has been dominated by two quite different approaches. The first distinguishes sharply between a traditional anti-Judaism founded in religious arguments and beliefs, and the essentially modern phenomenon of racial antisemitism that appeals to the materialist, biological arguments of racial pseudo-science. This approach emphasizes the anti-Christian animus in much modern, racial antisemitism. It draws upon such evidence as the famous comment by Wilhelm Marr, inventor of the term ‘antisemitism’, to the effect that Christianity was ‘a disease of the consciousness’, or Marr’s demand that the ‘Jewish question’ be framed in ‘non-confessional’ terms. This approach, which could also be labelled the ‘rupture thesis’, also stresses the incompatibility of racist arguments with the various Christian doctrines of grace. According to this view, the rise of racial antisemitism was the consequence of a ‘failure’ of Christianity. Antisemitism either arose because people were not Christian enough, or it developed in the vacuum that secularization left behind, becoming a kind of ersatz religion that usurped the inherited functions of Christianity. The rupture thesis indirectly derived some of its plausibility from the presumption that secularization is a defining feature of modernity.
An alternative view—we can call it the continuity thesis—has always had its own scholarly exponents, but has enjoyed a revival in recent years. This view stresses the linkages between Christian judaeophobia and modern antisemitism. It argues that the latter should be seen not as a distinct phenomenon that arises only once secularization is well advanced, but as the further evolution and expression of an anti-Judaism that was always implicit in the Christian tradition. Some exponents of this view stress the presence of believing Christians among the ranks of the racial antisemites, whereas others point to the close proximity of religiously motivated arguments to those derived from racial pseudo-science. This view sits comfortably with the recent emphasis on the continuing importance of religion in the modern era.
These two viewpoints should be seen as complementary rather than contradictory. They coexist precisely because the phenomenon of antisemitism was diffuse enough to admit a range of interpretations. German antisemitism was not a clearly defined, internally consistent system of beliefs. Rather, it was a loose cluster of discourses drawn from a wide range of traditions that could be mixed in varying proportions. Principled, racist antisemitism, in which a pseudo-philosophical judaeophobia supplied the foundations and determined the horizons of a world-view, was the affair of a small minority on the fringes of German politics. The antisemitic political parties—single-issue lobby groups focussed above all on the ‘Jewish Question’—were an electoral failure. But expressions of virulent hostility to the Jews could be found throughout the mainstream of Christian public life. In his repellent pamphlet, The Talmud Jew, the sometime Catholic theologian August Rohling depicted the Jews as morally corrupt and bent upon securing the economic domination of Germany through the most unscrupulous means. His pamphlet was one of the bestsellers of late-nineteenth-century antisemitism: it was widely excerpted and serialized in the popular Catholic press.
The Protestant political agitator Adolf Stöcker is another case in point. Stöcker, a chaplain to the imperial court who founded the populist Christian Social Party in 1878, combined traditional Christian judaeophobe themes—the Jews as killers of Christ, for example—with denunciations of their economic influence as drivers of capitalist exploitation, usurious lending, and financial speculation. Stöcker was a controversial figure who aroused ambivalent views even among conservative Protestant contemporaries. During the early years of his agitation, he found many supporters within north-German Protestant circles. His appeal to clergymen and their congregations lay precisely in the fact that he claimed to view the ‘Jewish Question’ as a ‘socio-ethical’, rather than a racial, issue. This was thought to set him apart from the beer-hall rabble-rousing of the racial antisemites. But the truth is that Stöcker blended traditional, modern anti-capitalist and racist arguments in promiscuous fashion. ‘We view the Jewish Question neither as a religious question, nor as a racial question, although in its roots it is both,’ he told a mass meeting in 1887. ‘Insofar as it appears in its external dimension as a socio-ethical question, we handle it thus.’17 It is remarkable how ubiquitous this circular interweaving of religious, ‘socio-ethical’, economic, and ethnic themes was in the various discourses of German antisemitism. This loose ideological formation meant that Christian publicists could expound antisemitic views while at the same time claiming on theological grounds to reject the doctrine of race.
How were the confessional antagonisms of the imperial era refracted in German antisemitism? After all, if we include the Jews, Germany was a ‘tri-confessional’ land.18 It thus makes no sense to think in terms of a bipolar relationship between a monolithic Jewish minority and a monolithic ‘Christian’ bloc. We must acknowledge that Protestants and Catholics engaged with the Jewish minority on their own terms, and also that the relationships between Christians and Jews were intimately affected by those within and between the Christian confessions. There is still disagreement among historians as to whether Protestantism and Catholicism generated distinct variants of antisemitism. Insofar as antisemites adhered to chauvinist ultranationalist views, they were more likely to be found (and feel at home) in the Protestant milieu. There was a growing tendency within late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant discourse to detach the German Protestant tradition from broader universalist affiliations by stressing its specifically national or Germanic quality. Among the key texts mined by antisemitic orators were the judaeophobe pamphlets of Martin Luther and the defamatory treatise Jewry Revealed written by the eighteenth-century Protestant orientalist Johann Andreas Eisenmenger. Catholics, by contrast, were anchored in an international ecclesiastical structure and felt themselves to be among the ‘losers’ of the nation-building process. For these reasons, one historian has argued that German antisemitism—in its modern racist form—was an ‘essentially Protestant phenomenon’.19
This argument is based on only a partial reading of the Catholic tradition. This becomes immediately apparent when one reads what was actually written in the late-nineteenth-century Catholic daily press. Here we find what appears to be the entire armoury of modern antisemitism, save for the doctrine of race itself: denunciations of the damaging economic influence of Jews and of their undue political prominence, their role in promoting a materialist culture founded on the negation of Christian values, conspiracy theories involving collaboration between Jews and Freemasons, wilful misreadings of the Talmud, even accusations of ritual murder. Yet, while there is no doubt that local Catholic newspapers and journals in most regions of Germany were contaminated by anti-Jewish prejudice, it is also the case that Catholic journals—and other Catholic writings, including especially the official pronouncements of the Centre Party—routinely condemned racial antisemitism. They did so in part because the new term ‘antisemitism’ was freighted with anti-Catholic connotations. But Catholics also denounced antisemitism because it conflicted with their own belief in the indivisibility of the grace bestowed upon humanity by God.
There is also evidence to suggest that the intensity of Catholic antisemitism varied over time and may in part have been a function of the tensions generated in the Kulturkampf era. Antisemitism was especially pronounced in the regional Catholic press during the 1870s, when the conflict between Catholics and their antagonists was at its height. But it swiftly subsided and had largely died away by the 1910s and 1920s, when German Catholics were less beleaguered, and therefore less combative and defensive. A comparative analysis of Catholic antisemitism in Württemberg, Bavaria, and Baden has shown that it was a far less prominent feature of Catholic publications in Württemberg, where there was no Kulturkampf to speak of, than it was in either of the other two states in the 1870s.20 These observations highlight the need to move beyond a binary model of the relationship between Christians and Jews. When we penetrate to the regional and local level, we begin to discern the complex dynamics of a tri-confessional system.
Is there any mileage left in the notion that Imperial Germany was a secularizing society? Germany remained, in most formal senses, an overwhelmingly Christian country. The German churches, Catholic and Protestant, remained powerful and well-resourced institutions, thanks in part to the ecclesiastical levy added to income taxes in most federal states during the last decades of the nineteenth century. In some areas, the churches were able to extend their involvement in charitable activities and other means of alleviating social hardship, despite the gradual expansion of state-sponsored welfare. In 1906, no less than 95 per cent of Protestant and 91 percent of Catholic children in the German Empire were educated in schools of their own confession. It was legally possible for Germans to distance themselves from a religious institutional affiliation of any kind by declaring themselves ‘without confession’ (konfessionslos), although by 1900 only 0.2 per cent of the population had taken up this option. New or modified forms of piety could still stimulate mass allegiance, as the blossoming of Catholic devotional groups demonstrates. We have already seen that confessional identities permeated many of the popular political movements of the day.
And yet there is no doubt that secularization was also underway in the German Empire. After 1890, the emergence of Social Democracy as one of the elemental forces in German politics brought to the fore a party whose outlook was avowedly secular and atheist (notwithstanding the residual confessional attachments of some of the party’s largely Protestant following). There were also signs of a dramatic decline in church attendance. Between 1862 and 1913, the proportion of Protestants taking communion in the city of Lübeck fell from 34 to 14 per cent. The figures for Prussia fell over the same period from 52 to 30 per cent. As Hugh McLeod has observed, the German experience combined strong religious institutions with weak religious participation (in contemporary Britain, theses poles were reversed). A distinction must be drawn, admittedly, between the two Christian confessions. Secularization was more marked among Protestants than among Catholics. In the confessionally mixed cities of Bochum and Münster in western Germany, Protestant rates of observance plunged between 1845 and 1930, following patterns that can be observed nationwide. By contrast, the corresponding figures show that Catholic observance was astonishingly resilient: by the 1920s, Catholic participation rates were twice as high as for Protestants. This asymmetry helps to explain the sense of paranoia experienced by many Protestants who believed that Germany was in the grip of an all-embracing process of re-Catholicization.
We might thus say that the imperial era was marked by the paradoxical intertwining of secularization and religious revival. The two processes did not merely coexist, however: they were dialectically interdependent; they conditioned each other. The secularizing measures of the Kulturkampf compelled Catholics to close ranks, thereby providing the fuel for a new generation of revival and expansion. The Centre Party, conversely, was conceived as a vehicle for defending and focusing Catholic interests, but was steadily drawn ever more deeply into the secular calculus of democratic politics. Paradoxically, as one historian of the Catholic parties in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe has observed, the organizations formed to bring religion into politics actually ended by taking it out. Secular liberal democracy was thus ‘expanded and consolidated by its enemies’.21
As this line of argument suggests, the confessional conflicts and revivals of the imperial era in some ways facilitated the modernization of German society. It is worth emphasizing this point, because it has often been claimed that the marshalling of popular religious commitments characteristic of this era was an essentially regressive phenomenon. Catholic revival in particular is thought to have retarded processes of political modernization, first, by pledging committed Catholics to a struggle against ‘modern civilization’ and, second, by concentrating them in a sociologically, ideologically, and culturally backward ‘ghetto’. This view cannot easily be reconciled with the transformations we have examined in this chapter. On both sides of the confessional divide, the mobilization of the faithful exhibited quintessentially modern features. German Protestantism participated in the great flowering of voluntary associational activity that transformed nineteenth-century German society. For Protestant women in particular, this activity developed a genuinely emancipatory momentum: it provided opportunities to become involved in the management of girl’s schools, childcare facilities, teachers’ associations, and a range of charitable and missionary activities. The relatively professionalized environment of the City Missions provided many middle-class Protestant women with an entry into what would later be known as ‘social work’ with children, the infirm, the poor, and the elderly. On the Catholic side, too, confessional allegiances were mobilized by quintessentially modern means: mass-circulation media, voluntary associations, mass meetings and demonstrations, the expansion of schooling among deprived social groups, and the increasingly prominent involvement of women in positions of responsibility as teachers, nurses, and administrators. Moreover, it is far from clear that Catholic mobilization hindered or delayed processes of political modernization. On the contrary, confessional conflict contributed to the broadening of political participation by providing Catholics (especially in rural areas) with a reason for entering the political arena as activists, deputies, or voters. As Margaret Lavinia Anderson has shown, Catholic women took part in street demonstrations, sit-down strikes, and election campaigns. In the 1880s, they were even invited to some Centre Party political meetings—this at a time when female attendance was still illegal (the Centre Party supported the Reich Association Law of 1908 that granted women the right to attend political meetings).22 For all the anti-modernism of its rhetoric, then, the Catholic Church, its lay auxiliaries, and its political allies were deeply implicated in Germany’s social and political transformation.
The Kulturkampf has often been seen as a chapter in a uniquely German story of interconfessional conflict whose roots lay in the Lutheran Reformation. But if we cast our eyes across Europe, we find that Germany’s quarrels were part of a broader Continental struggle. In Belgium, Italy, France, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, anti-clericals aligned themselves with the cause of the nation, which they imagined as an autonomous collectivity of unbound (male) consciences. They denounced their opponents as the stooges of a ‘foreign’ power structure bent on undermining the integrity and distinctiveness of the nation states. What was at stake in this struggle, they argued, was the very soul of the nation—its autonomy, its independence, its cultural, political, and economic modernity. It would thus be mistaken to see confessional struggles in Imperial Germany as way-stations on a path leading to the ‘German catastrophe’ of 1933. To be sure, traces of the confessional struggle can be discerned in the contours of Nazi Germany—not least in the relative impermeability of the Catholic electorate to the Nazi Party’s appeal. But religious conflict in the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine eras also held other possible futures. After 1945, following what seemed to many to be the debacle of the liberal nation-building project, the Catholic parties in Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands emerged as the champions of both subnational rights movements and of a close transnational union. In this—but not only this—sense, the Europe of today bears the imprint of the nineteenth century’s culture wars.